For many medical procedures, certain rules or guidelines exist or may be established. One example is a guideline or rule determining the location on or in a patient that a tip of an instrument should be placed in order to achieve an optimum effect. Another guideline may determine locations where such an instrument is not to be placed, thereby preventing harm to the patient or undesired results.
Medical technology has developed to a point where surgeons may use so-called image-guided surgery systems (IGS), which display image representations of body portions as well as instruments in their correct positional relationship with respect to the image representations. At present, surgeons must try to keep procedural guidelines in mind while they operate in an image-guided environment.
A problem arising from this practice resides in the fact that a surgeon, while carrying out a complicated operation, may only be able to remember or take into account a few guidelines at a time. Also, the constraints given by such guidelines may be very precise, whereas a surgeon equipped with the information of the image representation may only be able to guess or approximate whether such constraints are being fulfilled at a certain moment.
As a result, a level of uncertainty may exist when following certain medical rules or guidelines. Such uncertainty, in some instances, can lead to undesired results.